Is Garden-Variety Corruption Really Enough to Get a Republican Apparatchik Fired?
One of the defining features of the current era of Republican politics has been that Donald Trump's followers not only accept but affirmatively celebrate his nonstop grifting. None of them cared that he ripped off people through his so-called university, that he bragged about cheating on his taxes (claiming that doing so made him "smart"), that he left small business owners high and dry by breaching contract after contract, or any of the other schemes that he used to squeeze money out of people over the course of his long, sordid life.
No one could have been even mildly surprised that Trump tried to cash in on his mugshot or to sell pieces of the suit that he wore that day, or that he has been selling ridiculous gold sneakers at inflated prices. Nothing is more on-brand for Trump than shameless cash grabs. It is now outright laughable to think back to the discussions in late 2016 and early 2017 regarding whether he would refuse to profit from being the President.
And given that Trump's most intense supporters are reactionary, White evangelical Christians, this is perhaps unsurprising. People who could be convinced to send their few dollars of disposable income to, say, Jimmy Swaggart or some other Bible-thumping huckster evidently found it a natural pivot to begin sending money to Trump to support his "legal defense," even though it appears that he was pocketing the money that came in.
I note all of this here because I want to revisit and possibly reconsider my musings in the column I wrote earlier this week: "A Simple Grifter: The Latest Mess at the University of Florida Is Almost Disappointing in its Tawdriness." In that piece, I noted that former Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska, who had inexplicably become President of the University of Florida's main campus in Gainesville eighteen months ago, suddenly resigned effective July 31 of this year. Sasse's statement announcing his departure noted some apparently serious health issues that his wife is facing, and even though such unwelcome news would in general be a genuinely good reason for a person to set aside his career (assuming that such person has the means to do so), there has been some background noise suggesting that Sasse had been forced out. When a student journalist at UF then broke a story about overspending and cronyism in Sasse's presidential office, it was tempting to connect the dots.
To be clear, I did not say definitively -- because I did not in fact feel confident -- that Sasse was told to go quietly as a direct result of his low-level grifting. I did say that it was disappointing to see that Sasse was not only a con man but an unimaginative one at that. As a not-entirely-passe meme would have it, the best response to Sasse is simply: "Ya basic!" But again, is there a cause-and-effect here? Did the chair of the relevant board in Florida (who has given millions of dollars to Republican politicians in Florida, including the current governor) find out about Sasse's overspending and then show him the door?
Consider that Trump is by no means the only Republican who feels comfortable taking his own supporters for suckers. Uber-Trumper Steve Bannon was indicted for fleecing the MAGA faithful by taking donations supposedly to be used to "build the wall," and he is now awaiting trial in New York State court for money laundering, conspiracy and fraud in a $25 million scam. (All of that, of course, is entirely separate from Bannon's contempt of Congress charges.) Is there any evidence that Republicans suddenly turned on Bannon when they learned that he is corrupt? Hardly.
Admittedly, some examples of Republican corruption are as lowbrow as Sasse's, with multiple cabinet secretaries in the Trump Administration being forced out for things like overspending on office furniture, lavish personal travel, and so on. Many Trump appointees, however, were just as unethical but were not forced to leave. Betsy DeVos, for example, was not personally corrupt in office (as far as we know), but her family's vast wealth is based on one of the most shameless Ponzi multi-level-marketing schemes in US history.
Come to think of it, DeVos might be a particularly useful person to compare and contrast with Sasse. Both ended up in positions of significant authority in American education, even though neither of them was even close to being qualified for their jobs. Both embarrassed themselves on the job with regularity. Both were essentially apparatchiks whose job was to destroy that which they oversaw. DeVos stuck around, but that was probably because she is part of a billionaire family and has deep political connections. Sasse has no apparent political base, and what would have been a $10+ million payday over five years at UF (had he lasted) -- money that would be chump change to DeVos -- probably mattered to him.
It is a mistake to think that people with a lot of money will stop grifting (see Trump himself), and many people who were not born to wealth do not just grab whatever they can when no one is watching. Wannabes like Sasse are thus especially sad cases. That he follows the path of so many of his kind by wrapping himself in self-aggrandizing piety makes him a hypocrite on top of everything else.
In the end, it might not matter whether Sasse was pushed out because of his abuse of the public trust. He was not entirely useless from the standpoint of those who appointed him, but close enough. It had quickly become clear that he was treading water at best and needed to be pulled out of the deep end. Even if not a single dollar had been misspent, he might have been ditched sooner rather than later. Republicans are hardly scandalized when they watch each other pillage the public till. Shoving government money in one's pockets is not a sin to people who vilify the government.
At the very least, two things are true. Sasse was a garden-variety grifter, and Sasse was bad at his job, even as defined by the conservative ideologues who wanted him to destroy the "liberal indoctrination" factory in Gainesville. The former was probably not sufficient to push him out, while the latter surely was. Either way, his appointment was a mistake from the standpoint of those who chose him. But people who care about UF (and higher education more generally) have no reason to celebrate, because his replacement will probably be more capable of doing serious damage. And if so, we can be confident that that new person will be given some latitude to skim off some of the people of Florida's money every now and then.